Brian K. Vaughan is a busy man in the world of comics. He's not only enjoying the blockbuster success of Saga, but he's also putting out We Stand On Guard, Paper Girls, The Private Eye and a story for The Walking Dead.

We did a phone interview with Vaughan, which we'll be posting in two parts.

The half you're reading today features discussion on We Stand On Guard with artist Steve Skroce (of The Matrix fame), a small bit about the mysterious Paper Girls with Cliff Chiang (seriously, he barely gives up a thing aside from the paper quality), whether he will be returning to TV, and how he came to be working on a story for Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead with his Panel Syndicate artist Marcos Martin.

This interview took place last week, but both We Stand On Guard #4 and Paper Girls #1 are hitting today, so he won't be revealing any spoilers about either book.

Stay tuned for the other half of our interview about Saga with both Vaughan and Fiona Staples.

IGN Comics: My first question is, how do you say Steve's last name?

Brian K. Vaughan: Oh, it's an ongoing debate, including with Steve, but "Skross" is how I say it. I've heard "Skrochay" as well, but I just call him Steve.

IGN: [Laughs] Good to know! In this story, the Americans are the bad guys, but I'd wager the majority of your readership are Americans, and they're generally not used to seeing themselves depicted as the bad guys. With that in mind, did you find it challenging to write this story?

Vaughan: No, I think Americans can have an excellent sense of humor about themselves. Beyond that, you get the added distance of this is a story set a hundred years in the future. So we are not commenting on the current administration or either party. This is a far-flung, hypothetical future. I think it gives just enough safe space for people to engage with the story.

IGN: The main character, Amber, has proven to be fascinating because even though we are getting bits of her backstory, the Canadian resistance members don't really trust her -- at least not entirely. So are we as the reader also supposed to mistrust her?

Vaughan: I definitely wanted to write a different kind of protagonist, one that you didn't have as much access to her personal life, and she's not very forthcoming with it, even with her teammates who know that there are definitely more surprises to be learned about Amber moving forward.

IGN: What was the decision to have the Americans use giant robots to attack? It's this serious wartime comic actually feels pretty grounded, but then you have these giant Voltron robots.

Vaughan: You know, it's two things.

First of all, just that you get to work with Steve Skroce, who's one of the best designers of technology of any artist working today, so I think you want to see him cut loose.

But also, it was talking with Steve, and I mentioned, "I want this to be a fun, Starship Troopers kind of dark satire," so I didn't want it to be necessarily too realistic. I think it was Steve's idea, wouldn't it be interesting if the army engineers of the future were significantly influenced by the Hollywood cinema of their present and past. So yeah, all of these giant robots are sort of, what would a future America's idea of shock and awe be like, and how they would turn to Hollywood for that.

So we did our best to justify the nonsense decision to have giant robots.

IGN: Were there any particular robots that influenced Steve, or did he just come up with completely new ones?

Vaughan: I think it was Steve's idea to do something more animalistic, which I loved, because it seemed to dovetail with, DARPA has this BigDog project, which you might have seen YouTube video about, this sort of weirdly terrifying, dog-shaped robot creature that can help soldiers. So we wanted to push that and do the slightly heightened version of this weird reality that's already come into play.

IGN: Also, in the book you have a character that mainly speaks French. What was the thought behind that, and do you speak French?

Vaughan: No, which has proved to be just a terrible decision on my part. It was from visiting Montreal. I had the opportunity to visit Cirque du Soleil, and I was meeting a guy named Matthew there, who we've thanked in the back of the book before. Everyone in Quebec is completely fluent in French, so I wanted to have a character who was a proud Quebecois who would only speak French -- or at least a futuristic version of French, so we could excuse any terrible mistakes that I've made despite any translation help I've gotten.

IGN: [Laughs] Are there any talks about We Stand On Guard becoming a movie or TV show?

Vaughan: I guess it's like anything; I'm open to it, but I never go into it thinking about it.

For Steve and I, we met at a function out here in Hollywood, and I think we were both feeling like, "Wow, we're so grateful to get to work out here." Steve is a much more renowned figure out here than I, and his storyboards are legendary. But I think we both just missed comics, and I think we've both had opportunities to -- you know, we could both go work on movies tomorrow if we wanted to, but we both love comics. So, sure, if someone great comes along and sees a way for it to be a show or a movie, we'd hear them out. But for us this is the destination of the roadmap.

IGN: With Pacific Rim also having big robots, We Stand On Guard shares some similarities. Did you see that movie?

Vaughan: You know, I have not.

IGN: Well, that's the most recent giant robot movie, but the studio just pulled the sequel off the schedule, so I don't know if it's ever going to get made, which is bad for giant robot enthusiasts everywhere.

Vaughan: And see, that's one of the joys of comics. Having the pleasure of working in television a little bit, you also realize the limitations and the incredible amount of money it takes to do something like giant robots. I love that in comics we never have to think twice about what we put on any page. We can have Americans be bad guys and not have to have conversations with sponsors about what that means. So the total freedom of comics is one of the many reasons it is the best visual medium out there. Better than film or TV, I'm afraid to say.

IGN: Any final thoughts on We Stand On Guard now that you're halfway through this six-issue miniseries?

Vaughan: Issue 4 comes out this coming Wednesday [Editor's Note: that's today!], and it has the most badass cover of any book I've ever worked on. It has a half-coyote, half-wolf attacking one of these American robot dogs. It is nutty and beautiful. Steve really outdid himself.

IGN: I also wanted to ask you about Paper Girls -- although I'm actually afraid to ask a question because you've kept the mystery of what it is under wraps. What can you say about it without spoiling anything?

Vaughan: I just got a big stack of comics in the mail today, so I get to finally hold it in my hands, and it is lovely. Cliff Chang worked with Image, and he was like, "Look, if we're going to call this book Paper Girls, we have to really select our paper carefully," and it is just a beautiful object, especially when comics are usually just whatever's the cheapest paper available. I can reveal that this is going to be the loveliest physical object on shelves, if nothing else, this coming week.

IGN: Do you have any other projects that you're working on? Any plans to return to TV?

Vaughan: No, not currently. I left Under the Dome shortly after the first season just because -- it was an honor to work on, and Stephen King is one of my heroes -- but I just miss my kids. I have two small kids, and the executive producer lifestyle is pretty rigorous. So no, right now I'm just enjoying writing a million comics. I'm open to returning to TV someday, but right now I just like making new stuff, and comics seems much more open to new stuff than Hollywood at the moment.

Oh, and I forgot to plug my site, PanelSyndicate.com, that I run with Marcos Martin, our pay-what-you-want series The Private Eye. It's finally coming to print from Image in December, this gorgeous, landscape hardcover edition. But Marcos and I are already working on a new digital series that will be debuting before the end of the year at Panel Syndicate. So keep refreshing the site on your browser -- every day, please. Something new will be there soon.

As Marcos and I have said, there's almost no overlap between the digital readers and print readers, so I think it's exciting that people who hate reading stuff on computers will finally have an opportunity to read this all in one sitting.

IGN: Is that why you decided to go to print after having it just be digital for so long?

Vaughan: You know, Marcos Martin was always really adamant, "Let's keep it digital." It was fun for the story, about a world without Internet, to have it just as only a serial, online comic. But he also wanted to force people like us -- we're not computer guys, not digital readers -- to come over to that side. So we'd always planned to keep it, but, no, it was Robert Kirkman jokingly saying, "What will it take for Image to print The Private Eye?" And we responded, "If we can have Walking Dead, you guys can have Private Eye," and Kirkman was like, "Alright, sold! Let's do it." So it sort of started out as a joke, and then Marcos was like, "Wow, we could do an original Walking Dead story at Panel Syndicate, and it would introduce a whole new audience. People who have maybe never even read comics might check it out, and maybe this print version, maybe Robert Kirkman was right, now that we've left a whole big segment of the audience out in the cold." So that was our thinking behind all that.

IGN: Yeah, that was a totally unexpected announcement, that you're going to be working in the world of The Walking Dead. Will your story tie into the main series?

Vaughan: It's totally canonical. Robert has signed off on it, and it counts. I think for fans of The Walking Dead, it will be totally and especially meaningful. But I also wanted to do the kind of thing where if you never read it you're not going to miss out on anything important, and if you're the one person on the planet who's never read The Walking Dead that you would be able to enjoy this as well. But really, it's mostly just an excuse to see Marcos Martin in black and white -- as much as I love Muntsa Vicente, our colorist on Private Eye, who almost always works with Marcos, it was really special to get to see Marcos doing zombies in black and white. I think people are going to love it.

IGN: With so many superhero movies and TV shows being made, are there any of your superhero stories that you've done that you'd like to see get adapted to the screen? Like your Doctor Strange story or The Hood or Runaways?

Vaughan: Oh, sure! That all sounds okay to me. I think our Runaways would be terrific to see some capacity. If not as a film, maybe a TV show someday. And yeah, The Hood is one of my favorite things I've ever worked on. So if Marvel wants to do a Hood TV show tomorrow, I would, if nothing else, get a season pass on my DVR.

Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Pokemon, Green Lantern, or Lady Gaga are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter and IGN.